


Change

by DrummerGirl231



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Brothers, Comedy, Family, Family Feels, Gen, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-29 12:15:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19019725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrummerGirl231/pseuds/DrummerGirl231
Summary: As glad as Huey is to have his mom home, he doesn't realize how much his anxiety has been building up until Dewey questions his priorities.





	Change

Huey set down the basket of clean laundry when he reached the top of the tower steps and tried to shake out the ache in his arms. The basket wasn’t usually so heavy, but with all the excitement over the weekend, he was a few days behind his usual chore schedule. He pushed the basket to his bedroom door with his foot to give his arms a rest and turned the doorknob with his less sore arm, only to be greeted by a startled yell from Dewey.

“IT WASN’T ME!”

It didn’t take a genius to know it was him, though what was wreaking havoc on his brother’s conscience, Huey had no idea. It probably had to do with whatever he’d obviously shoved under his pillow.

Huey rolled his eyes and pushed the laundry basket to their dresser. “If it wasn’t you, who was it? Louie?”

“Uh… yeah! Louie! It was totally his fault. I told him, ‘Don’t do it, Louie! You’re a better man than this! Look deep within your heart! That’s the real you! The real you would never–”

“What did you do, Dewey?” Huey stared him down with one hand on the edge of an open drawer and waited.

Dewey darted his eyes back and forth, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead, but Huey wouldn’t look away until he had answers. At last, Dewey couldn’t bare his guilt any longer.

“I broke Mom’s leg!”

“You WHAT?!” Huey clapped his hands to his face. “Is she okay? Oh no, and she only has the one leg, and… wait.” He remembered Dewey shoving something under his pillow. “Her natural leg, or her prosthesis?”

Dewey took a big breath and let it out with a whine as he lifted his pillow and held up Della’s prosthesis in two pieces.

Huey slapped his own forehead, torn between frustration with Dewey and relief their mother wasn’t hurt.

“How’d it happen?”

“Okay, well… it was my turn to do the dusting in here, right?”

“Yeah…?”

“But I couldn’t find the duster with the long handle! So I was thinking, Mom’s prosthetic is kinda shaped like the duster…”

“Prosthesis.”

“Buh?”

“Prosthetic is an adjective, so if you use ‘prosthetic,’ it needs to be followed by a noun… in this case, ‘leg.’ So I believe the word you were looking for is _prosthesis_ , which is a noun.”

Dewey groaned. “What’s the point in Mrs. B. giving us a minimum day if you’re just gonna keep giving grammar lessons? Anyway, I put a fuzzy sock over the foot and it was working fine as a duster until I needed to unbend the knee a little more to reach the higher shelves of the bookcase, and then it broke!” He made a few feeble attempts to reattach the lower portion of the leg to the knee and upper leg, but the two halves wouldn’t stay together.

“Mom let you borrow her leg to dust our room?” Huey crossed his arms. 

“Well…” Dewey cringed with guilt.

_“You stole an amputee’s prosthesis?!”_

“I _borrowed_ it! She’s not using it right now! She’s still sleeping off the Novocain… er… whatever meds they gave her. I dunno if Novocain is supposed to make people sleepy.”

Scrooge had taken Della to both the doctor and the dentist that morning during the kids’ homeschool lessons with Mrs. Beakley, and after a physical exam, a few tests, and some dental work, Scrooge brought home his loopy, lightweight niece while the kids were having lunch and tucked her in to sleep off the drugs the dentist gave her.

“I almost got caught by Uncle Scrooge coming down the hall. D’you think he was checking on her? D’you think he noticed her leg wasn’t on the nightstand anymore?”

Of all the half-brained, inappropriate… stealing their mother’s only means of getting around while she was out cold… using it for household chores, and then… “Gah! Just…!” Huey took a few deep breaths and pressed his fingers to the space between his eyes, pinching them shut. “Come here. I’ll fix it.”

While Dewey climbed down with the leg, Huey reached under their bunk bed for his tool kit.

“Unbelievable… what’s next? Stealing a diabetic’s insulin needle to punch a hole in a belt that’s too big?”

“No one in the house has diabetes… and I don’t wear belts much.”

“Oh of course! Silly me!” Huey fumed as he sat up, pulling his tool kit out from under the bed. “That’s the only reason you can’t do those things! You don’t have the means!”

He held out his hand for the prosthesis and Dewey passed the pieces to him. It didn’t look broken, exactly… there were no dents or jagged edges. It looked as though it just needed to be put back together. After examining the knee joint and figuring out which part was the front, he screwed the lower leg back on… but then the foot was facing backwards. So he unscrewed it, flipped it around, and tried again.

“Yeah, I did that much, but it wouldn’t stay on!” Dewey said.

Then Huey noticed there was a bolt missing from the knee joint.

“Where’s the bolt that goes here?” he asked.

“…Somewhere?” Dewey shrugged.

Huey groaned and left the leg on the floor to search around the bookcase. “You said you were dusting around here, right? Did you hear anything fall on the floor?”

“I was listening to music on my phone while I was dusting.”

“Well did you _feel_ anything hit the floor?”

“No…? Because I’m not a deaf or blind superhero with heightened seismic sense? …but MAN that’d be cool!”

“Just help me look!” Huey said as he checked the shelves of the bookcase. “Where were you exactly when you broke the…”

“Found it!”

Huey had so little faith in his brother’s competence at the moment, he half-expected him to be holding up a moldy cheesy puff. Thankfully, he really had found the bolt.

“I guess it rolled over to the desk.”

Huey snatched it out of Dewey’s hand and put it back in the knee joint, then opened his bag of tools and pulled out a wrench to tighten it.

“And what did you learn today?” Huey asked.

“That it’s called a prosthesis, or a prosthetic _leg._ ”

“And…?”

“That Mom snores.”

_“And…?”_

Dewey sighed. “Borrowing an amputee’s prosthetic leg without asking to dust a bookshelf is wrong.” He lowered his voice to a mutter. “But I bet Mom woulda been cool with it…”

“Don’t you think she’s been through enough? We should be making things easier for her if we can. How is stealing her leg making things easier for her?”

“You’ll have it fixed before she wakes up and needs it, right?”

Huey only grumbled.

“OOH also!” Dewey changed the subject. “Uncle Scrooge has a trip planned for the arctic in a couple days. He told Mom she can be the pilot. It’ll be our first adventure with her!”

“ _Your_ first adventure with her. I’ve got a Junior Woodchuck meeting.”

“Then miss it! How can you choose the Junior Woodchucks over Mom?”

Huey looked up from his task and fixed his eyes on Dewey’s. “You wanna give me heck right now when _I’m_ the one fixing Mom’s prosthesis that _you_ broke?”

That seemed to do the trick. Dewey stayed silent as Huey bent the leg at the knee to make sure he’d fixed it. It seemed a little stiff, so he loosened the bolt. When he got it to where it seemed the two halves weren’t going to come apart, but the knee joint still bent, he handed the leg back to Dewey.

“Now go put this back in Mom’s room, and if she’s awake, tell her what happened. And if she’s not, let her sleep and then tell her later, or I will!”

“Okay, okay…”

Dewey took a few steps toward the door before he stopped and spun around. “Almost forgot!” He put the prosthesis on Louie’s bunk before climbing up to his own and grabbing something Huey couldn’t see. When he made it back down and picked up the leg again, he held up the fuzzy sock he’d borrowed as a dust cloth to show Huey and grinned. The white and aqua striped sock was covered in dust on one side, especially at the edge.

“Gimme that!” Huey snatched the sock out of Dewey’s hand. “You’re not returning it like this. I’ll put it in the laundry room when I take the basket back downstairs.”

“Awesome. Thanks bro! See ya later!” and he ran out the door.

Huey sighed and put his tools away before turning his attention back to his basket of neatly folded laundry.

 _“How can you choose the Junior Woodchucks over Mom?”_ Dewey’s question echoed in his mind and tightened guilt’s grip on him, but he shook his head and reached for a neatly folded shirt from the basket to place in his drawer. _I made a commitment,_ he reminded himself. _I said I would be there, so I have to be there. Mom would be proud of me for that… right?_

But if Huey were being honest with himself, it wasn’t about honoring his commitments.

Everything was changing. Everything was different. He needed something to stay the same. He needed one thing to happen the way he thought it would. Just _one_ thing. There was nothing in the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook about long-lost mothers coming home while primary guardians were on vacation, or about repairing prosthetic limbs made of rocket parts, or doing weekend chores during the week, or having several hours of lessons suddenly cancelled so he could catch up on those chores, or…

Huey turned his back to the dresser and slumped to the floor, fingers trembling as he reached under his hat for his precious guidebook. He flipped through the pages, knowing he wouldn’t find anything that could help him now, but needing to see those familiar pages… to know that some things don’t change. But as he searched, felt, and even smelled the pages, he found to his horror that he didn’t feel any better, and realizing the guidebook wasn’t making him feel any better made him feel even worse. If the JWG couldn’t comfort him, then nothing was the same.

His vision grew blurry. He shut the guidebook and set it aside before his tears could dampen its pages. Burying his face in his arms crossed over his knees, he took a shuddering breath and wept… every muffled whimper unheard by his family.

**Author's Note:**

> I did this for a writing prompt meme on Tumblr.
> 
> Poor Huey is so happy to have his mommy home, but sometimes change is just plain hard to deal with, and you don't even realize how much anxiety change is causing until one little thing causes a mini nervous breakdown. You think you're fine, you're doing great, you're managing all the craziness well, and then BOOM. Crying on the floor. Ya feel?


End file.
